Oh and today I flew over the Tesla manufacturing company. My god, that place is fucking huge!

That's the old GM Freemont assembly plant, isn't it?

I have no idea. I just saw the Tesla letters on the building from over a mile away, then flew up to it and got a pic.

I thought it was.

5.3 million sq ft.!!

"The Tesla Factory is an automobile manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, US, and the principal production facility of Tesla Motors. The facility was formerly known as New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota.

The current facility was opened in 1962 as the GM Fremont Assembly, and later used as a plant for New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota.[6][1] The plant is located in the East Industrial area of Fremont between Interstates 880 and 680 and employs around 3,000 people"

There are whole forums on the net based on that type of scenario. The movie "I robot" deals with it a bit too. Will Smith is distraught by the choice the robot made in his accident. The situation was two cars going over a bridge and underwater. A child in one a little further down the water, and will in his car. Both are about to drown. The robot calculates the survival chances of each and assigns the girl 14% and will smiths character a little more. Will protests, but the robot disobeys. It is a fundamental breach of the 3 laws. The robot must conserve human life, and must obey human commands, but it does what it chooses to do.

AI which should develop the singularity in the next 30 years say is going to cause a whole lot of philosophical arguments with practical implications, that we should be dealing with right now.

I put this up as a challenge on my facebook page last week.

proposition: most taxes are income taxes. Dilemma robots are about to replace a huge percentage of those people paying the taxes, with no source of income replacement yet defined.

Discuss the possibility of assigning a level of income equivalent to the work done by robots, and assess the owners INCOME TAX for work done by robots (in addition ot regular corp taxes).

Theoretically, with almost no real costs in the employment column and a high barrier to entry to own a factory full of robots, the rich will soon own not just almost everything, but rather essentially everything of value, and there is no way to prevent the avalanche once everyone starts to not have jobs. With the money saved on the employment side, they will be able to pick up say, real estate, at bankruptcy prices, for instance, thus reducing costs of capital, as well as labour. There is almost nothing that can stop the slide of wealth to a handful of people. Especially, if say ONE company was essentially in control of the robots creation and research. Now this may be a theoretical problem of control you say....but it is already PAST TENSE. Google has been acquiring almost everything.

Now you say there may be some competition, among say manufacturers...but sure, what if the transportation link is severed...or THROTTLED like the internet companies do now. Say Google just decides you DONT GET your products delivered by the robot fleet...you can go buy a horse and buggy to do it (once robot cars start they will either go away forever, or everything else will be replaced in less than 5 years). NO business can compete with the bottleneck of a monopoly, and we should be getting laws into play NOW before it happens in actuallity...although it is too late in my opinion.

Oh and today I flew over the Tesla manufacturing company. My god, that place is fucking huge!

That's the old GM Freemont assembly plant, isn't it?

I have no idea. I just saw the Tesla letters on the building from over a mile away, then flew up to it and got a pic.

I thought it was.

5.3 million sq ft.!!

"The Tesla Factory is an automobile manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, US, and the principal production facility of Tesla Motors. The facility was formerly known as New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota.

The current facility was opened in 1962 as the GM Fremont Assembly, and later used as a plant for New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota.[6][1] The plant is located in the East Industrial area of Fremont between Interstates 880 and 680 and employs around 3,000 people"

They must depend on the use of a lot of robots. 3000 employees in 5.3 million square feet. That averages out to about 1,767 sq ft/ employee. Unless they are only using a portion of the facility.

i bet somehow the manufacturers will have the customer sign off that any accident is the owners responsibility.

companies like Apple, Google could add a lot to automotive tech buy just designing an electric car from the ground up. Will they (i hope) offer the self driving as a $9,995.99 option you can opt out of.

qd2009 saidI'd think that the choice the car makes will simply be a reflection of that of the programmer's.

True, the parameters the programmers create. And the ability of the car's sensors. Which may or may not be impaired by real-world conditions.

While driving down to Key West on Nov 13 we ran into a very heavy rain storm in the middle Keys. Actually more a sea squall, since the Keys are really a string of small islands out in the ocean, between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

That stretch of US Highway 1 was only undivided double lane, 1 lane each direction. With much standing water from the torrential downpour, already greatly reducing visibility. It's not unusual in Florida that the rain gets so bad that you have to pull over and wait.

And as trucks passed us in the other direction their tires launched gallons of water on our car all at once, and we lost all visibility for a moment. Like being in a drive-through car wash. Experience told me how to drive straight ahead until I had visibility, but I was close to just pulling over.

What would a self-driving car do, when its camera(s) and sensors are blinded? Would it alert, disengage and revert to manual driver control? What if the driver had dozed off? People are not always too bright. What if a driver in a passenger minivan had walked to the back to get some snacks from his cooler?

Of course a seat sensor, like the front passenger has for seat belt use, could be employed to discourage that behavior in some manner. But the creativity of people to find new ways to be stupid can never be underestimated. I'm not convinced self-driving cars are smart enough yet to compensate for human dumbness, not to mention merely navigating the roads.

qd2009 saidI'd think that the choice the car makes will simply be a reflection of that of the programmer's.

True, the parameters the programmers create. And the ability of the car's sensors. Which may or may not be impaired by real-world conditions.

While driving down to Key West on Nov 13 we ran into a very heavy rain storm in the middle Keys. Actually more a sea squall, since the Keys are really a string of small islands out in the ocean, between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

That stretch of US Highway 1 was only undivided double lane, 1 lane each direction. With much standing water from the torrential downpour, already greatly reducing visibility. It's not unusual in Florida that the rain gets so bad that you have to pull over and wait.

And as trucks passed us in the other direction their tires launched gallons of water on our car all at once, and we lost all visibility for a moment. Like being in a drive-through car wash. Experience told me how to drive straight ahead until I had visibility, but I was close to just pulling over.

What would a self-driving car do, when its camera(s) and sensors are blinded? Would it alert, disengage and revert to manual driver control? What if the driver had dozed off? People are not always too bright. What if a driver in a passenger minivan had walked to the back to get some snacks from his cooler?

Of course a seat sensor, like the front passenger has for seat belt use, could be employed to discourage that behavior in some manner. But the creativity of people to find new ways to be stupid can never be underestimated. I'm not convinced self-driving cars are smart enough yet to compensate for human dumbness, not to mention merely navigating the roads.

"What would a self-driving car do, when its camera(s) and sensors are blinded?"

What would it do in an ice storm or covered with snow?

Me thinks this technology has a very long way to go before it's truly prime time ready.

It has to be able to be overridden to go back to complete manual control in some situations much like I do by turning off traction control and stability systems in deep rutted snow.